Ice cream sandwiches
on hot summer days. Cartoons all afternoon and Saturday morning
long. Great neighborhood-wide games like "kick the can"
and "hide Jeremy's shoes". Sleepovers at friends'
houses where you try to stay up all night playing Nintendo.
Homework cram sessions in the carpool to school. Actually counting
the days down to Christmas and feeling like it would never arrive.

Just
imagine a childhood without Nintendo or Atari 2600!
Is that a world you want your kids to grow up in? They
wouldn't understand the complexities of finding the
negative world in Super Mario Bros., or how to
save yourself from paying for door repairs in the original
Zelda by turning off the system fast! These video
game examples teach real life lessons. Like how to kill
turtles and mushrooms without fear or regret and how
to get away scott free after destroying old people's
property.

Yes, I speak of youth. My youth, your youth, everybody's youth.
Unless you're a redheaded stepchild who got beaten more regularly
than Tina Turner (cause she wouldn't shut the fuck up!!)
I'm guessing that you have some pretty fond memories of your
childhood and that you've longed for them in at least one instance
in your miserable life.

Personally, my childhood was pretty grand. I had all the G.I.
Joe figures and vehicles I could ever want (well, other than
the U.S.S. Flagg Aircraft Carrier and that Space Shuttle thingie);
I was allowed to eat sugared-up cereals (unlike my friends the
Chionchios who only got to eat plain Cheerios I'm guessing because
of the rhyming thing); I was allowed to play outside until kinda
late on school nights (till around 8 o'clock, which is like
1AM in adult time); I had a Nintendo in my bedroom (and my sister
wasn't allowed to play it); and I would participate in an average
of 2-3 sleepovers a month. If that's not living right I don't
know what is!

Now that I'm
much older and farther away from those delightful days of yore
I can finally afford to look back without breaking down and
crying at the thought of being that much more elderly and closer
to death. Honestly, I still do cry a little, but it's mostly
cause I miss my Transformers so goddamn much. But this new perspective
of age that I now have is a blessing and a curse. It's true
that I can see just how great I used to have it as a child,
but I can also see just how much I don't have now. Yeah, I have
lots of DVDs and books and shit, but they don't hold the magic
of my He-Man and Hot Wheels collections. It's true that I still
have most of my original Nintendo games and a working NES, but
other than Metroid, Super Mario Bros. and Zelda,
I was horrified to find out that I now completely SUCK at just
about everything in my classic video game library. What kind
of a fucked up reality do we live in where imagination and game
skills get worse with age?!

Ideally, we, as human
beings, would get smarter, stronger, more imaginative and more
free thinking the older that we get. Instead we get duller,
lazier, and more like a cog in the boring and broken down machine
known as life. To quote Cliff Clavin, "What's up with that?"
Sure there are still a few adults today with the minds of children,
but they turn out to be gay children's show hosts, or mentally
mongoloid. Or both. In which case we can't tap their minds to
find out how to be free of the shackles of drab grown-up living.
So sad.

Sometimes childhood
can be so traumatic to certain kids that it causes them to lash
out in the form of deluded fictional reality worlds in which
they are kings/queens. The recent trend that I've noticed it
children wanting to kill evil parents with Harry Potter-like
mad magician skillz. The only cure that I've found is to drop
a car on them and tell them that Ron and Harry must have lost
their magical powers while flying to Hogwarts because they had
the magic AIDs in them. That usually shuts the retard muggles
up.

As an experimental experiment I recently tried to find some
of my lost imagination from years gone by. I spent an entire
weekend reading old Spider-Man and X-Men comic
books, playing with whatever GI Joe toys I didn't hawk off for
booze money in college, looking through the women's underwear
section of the 1987 Sears Summer catalog, and attempting to
remember where the fuck the final dungeon was in the second
quest in Zelda. Well, the comic books got boring fast
(it amazed me to see just how completely repetitive they all
were and how none of the female characters got naked). The GI
Joes were still cool, but I didn't know how to get them into
a battle-filled storyline that didn't involve Flint trying to
seduce the lady Joes, the Baroness and Tomax and Xamot (who
were the closest he was able to get anyone into the sack, FYI).
The Sears catalog was still pretty provocative in this day and
age, but when compared to the internet (where a boy can find
over 2,000 images in less than 5 seconds of women sucking off
kangaroos while cats with strap-ons shag them from the rear)
it just ain't enough to do anything for me anymore. Honestly,
now I need at least one form of hardcore lesbian action (involving
no less than 6 women) to get even slightly aroused. I did remember
where the final Ganon dungeon was in Zelda and I kicked
the dark prince's pig ass back to the Golden Land, but without
the use of realistic 3D polygon-graphics depicting severed limbs
and gallons of blood drowning out my TV screen, well... 8-bit
Link just doesn't do it for me anymore either... But not in
a sexual way. Those tights are still ass perfect.

I guess that
I blame society for my woes. You see, back in the old days,
like King Arthur's time, kids only had a few board games and
Slinkies to play with and they spent most of their time praying
to a loveless god to spare them from the black death. That went
on for generations. Now, every 6 months to a year toys and the
availability of pornography evolve exponentially. In no time
will we see the advent of soldier action figures that fight
the bad guys themselves, without the aid of children, and then
hit the local whore houses for some much needed R&R (the
whore houses coming equipped with a life-sized blow up doll
of Bangkok Betty with kung-fu grip and "sucky sucky"
lifelike squishy sounds... God how I want to be a toymaker!!!).